The present invention is in the field of aircraft braking systems. More specifically this invention relates to an apparatus and method for more easily measuring the wear of aircraft brakes.
Presently aircraft brakes typically are manufactured with a wear pin. This pin is an indication of the wear of the brakes. On larger aircraft, when the wear pin is no longer protruding from its indicator hole, the brakes are ready for replacement. However, on smaller aircraft, where the wear on each landing is less, even a small amount of wear pin remaining can be a significant amount of remaining landings. However, because these brakes are not checked after every landing, and an approximate number of remaining landings was not known, often a decision is made to remove these brakes from the aircraft when there is a small amount of wear pin still showing. Often the practice has been to remove the brakes from the aircraft to get an accurate measurement of the remaining wear pin, to better determine the remaining number of landings. Once an accurate measurement of the wear pin is obtained, the original size of the wear pin is determined by looking up the part number. The difference between the original size and the current size is then divided by the number of landings to give an approximate “wear-per-landing”, and this is then used to estimate the number of remaining landings. Because of the time and complexity of this process, it is usually not performed on site, and sometimes the brake is just scrapped with remaining landings left.
An apparatus and method is desired which allows measurement of the wear pin without removal of the brake from the aircraft. It is further desired to have a program which would allow for easy calculation of the remaining landings based on the measurement of the wear pin.